the arab league has an objective with damascus from the organization as it presses for negotiations between warring parties this comes as president assad tries to appease some of the resentment against the regime and the new constitution. party elections next year. people who as you mentioned the criticize me. they say that if your humble servant part in the election that would mean that there would be no election. perhaps that would be the case for them but an ordinary citizen always has a choice to make it is all in the hands of the people. the press to speak about his bid to return as a president. russian prime minister also talks about his plans for the economy and political stability is vital for the. next we have the kaiser report look at the u.s. investment bank that is even willing to take a gamble that it will be unable to pay its debts find out what that's about.

hi i'm max kaiser this is the kaiser report. banking terrorists suicide bankers it's a plague what we do about them days never yes max apparently some capitalists have bought the rope to hang themselves with it's come true j.p. morgan's bet against j.p. morgan and apparently j.p. morgan hedges the spread on its own debt when investors bid up the yield an indicator that they think the bank won't pay j.p.

morgan makes money because they've taken a bet against themselves the bank reported one point nine billion in revenue and that's against itself right that's right the bank is manipulating markets that's true they are trading in insider information that's true they're using credit default swaps invented by their very own blith masters to gorge themselves on the list of games that's true they're bankrupting the country that they operate in america that's true jamie diamond's apartment is now being surrounded by an angry mob looking to lynch him that's true and justifiable so j.p. morgan is an unqualified financial terrorist and this proves it they this is just one more example of bankers using markets to blow themselves up their suicide bankers now we condemn suicide bombers in the middle east for example or in other

places around the world or timothy mcveigh. but why no condemnation for jamie diamond he's a suicide banker why but during tough economic times you see over and over during the housing crash what would happen people have insurance on their homes and if they could either sell it at fifty percent mark down or they could burn it and collect one hundred percent so if the us economy is dead and it's not coming back and the only hope that j.p. morgan could have is like a few fees on food stamp cards well maybe it's better for them to just burn the whole thing down and collect the insurance. that doesn't doesn't point well taken so the analogy to the housing market to be the arson scam of collecting the insurance and burning down your house so jamie dominos aside what you're saying here is that the j.p. morgan bank is worth more to him dead than alive well apparently and you know they had a lot of revenue from their killing their own bank and they don't care if they kill their employees or kill the country they don't care any minds me of

a few months ago we covered a story i think it was paul ryan or eric cantor was double short us treasuries that's right that's right one of the politicians i think it was eric cantor who actually made a huge bet against u.s. treasuries and then actively was trying to pass laws that would hurt the american economy while he passed laws what he was voting against raising the debt ceiling so that would cause his portfolio of a double short against america in the u.s. treasury market to rise that's the problem everyone in congress is effectively a day trader they've made positions against their own country they're highly leveraged and insider trading for congressman by the way is legal people don't understand that but for a congressman you can trade on inside information there's no law against it so again you know what occupy wall street is out there it doesn't matter the banks continue to commit fraud against everybody and here's the next headline max wall

street sees no exit from financial woes as. ankara's fret yes the poor bankers are fretting betting against themselves isn't just enough they're manic depressive people one hedge fund manager is quoted here i don't think it's time to make money this is a time to rig for survival another finance guy says they're not going to make the kind of money they wanted i'm not sure people really have come to terms with the fact that what we had was a financial bubble well these are the we're grigg is interesting when a lot of these hedge fund managers are sailors out there in greenwich connecticut as well is he saying he's rigging his sales to deal with this economic catastrophe that they created or are you saying. in our day to day operations of market rigging we need to rig these markets for survival instead of rigging these markets for growth well i believe it's the second option here and this is a good proof that the hedge fund community which is the tail wagging the economic

dog sort of lives entirely on market ringing look at john paulson he was part of the market rigging two years ago he made billions on the collapse of the mortgage market this year he's lost billions because his market rigging didn't work out the way he thought it was going to work this way because they cracked down on it this was he had a direct relationship with lloyd blankfein and goldman sachs so he was shorting goldman sachs's c.d.o. packages on u.s. subprime he shorted goldman sachs's callet credit default swaps against greece so he was able to have that inside information what was going to blow up before it happened this year they're now cracking down on goldman sachs when they had to go in front of the congress and mitt that they were selling crappy products to people around the world and they were intentionally blowing them up so it appears john paulson he's got a trillion dollar credit line he makes massive speculative bets two years ago on the collapse of america's economy this year he makes bad bets. the capital

never actually went to work in the economy to support growth or jobs or legitimate g.d.p. growth all that resulted was a huge around trip for that capital minus john paulson's billion dollar fee and that's all that happened and the point is i think these protesters want to know is is that treasonous and of course the answer is is indisputable the fact is it doesn't matter because it's continuing on as this article continues neil barofsky the former special inspector general for the troubled asset relief program said quote i wouldn't shed too many tears for wall street this. demick advantage that the too big to fail banks enjoyed in the lead up to the financial crisis may be diminished in the near term but the structure is still essentially the same and will certainly help catapult them to record profits and bonuses once the good times

return that's true they system as we describe it just spinning money through the laundromat is the new york stock exchange creates enormous fees for the money launderers look at again walkover year when volved in a near four hundred billion dollar mexican drug money laundering operation they pay very little five hundred sixty million dollars fine that was it so is that is there anything in place to stop that from happening no no well max you mentioned a walkover was involved a longer three hundred seventy eight billion dollars for the mexican drug cartels we know that that's a fact it's only stated but never any investigation no criminal investigation no time for one single person involved in this it was all accidental three hundred seventy eight billion they paid one hundred sixty million dollars fine this week we've also seen a hedge fund manager sentenced to eleven years for making seventy five million dollars worth of ill gotten gains on insider trading which every single day in the market one hundred million is taken from pension funds from small job agad donuts

investors through high frequency trading which is the is essentially insider trading they step in front of all trades all pension fund trades they see what you're about to do to your pension fund on your behalf they rig it to take from that and so how is that any different from insider trading i don't understand or the bank of new york scandal which is now coming to the fore they apparently have stolen something on the order of four hundred billion dollars as well from pension accounts by gauging and look back trades which i've explained on the show several times and they won't even allow the case to go to court even though. the prosecutors are anxious to go to court and they have been caught red handed stealing billions of dollars bank of new york again is that a crime against humanity of course it is well the markets decide max and the markets are not pricing in any real long term effect at all on bank of new york

mellon so that is not going to happen and you can count on everything continuing as such taxpayer nursing huge losses on r.b.s. and lloyds three years on from the bailouts and instead of the profits expected market meltdown and bank regulation means the taxpayer sitting on thirty two billion pound paper loss yes it's the regulation and the market meltdown caused by regulation that is making the taxpayer who own us the banks royal bank of scotland and loys you guys are sitting on a thirty two billion pound loss on a sixty billion pound investment in these banks oh and let's roll erin burnett and that clip what she's down on wall street on the occupy wall street and she talks to a protester there she says a bald faced lie she says that the taxpayers made money on the bailouts play clip said you know that taxpayers actually made money on the wall street bailout. it is they may not g.m. but they did on the on the wall street rebel out there does that make you feel any

differently walmart of yours. if i were right in my that was a lie that's not true and as you just pointed out these are bread a catastrophe you know banking apologists always say that the bailouts made money because they selectively look at one or two that did all look at a.i.g. however look at fannie mae and freddie mac. we have lost money time after time after time look at the fed's balance sheet there's trillions and trillions of dollars of bad debts on those books that we're not allowed to look at too much detail so what the heck is on there and how much is yet to be revealed for use generally accepted accounting principles when looking at any of these banks and you'll find out that not a single one has paid back any amount of money to bail out. people only if you accept as the hedge funds we talked about market rigging is the way to go if you fraud then you can put on the blinkers and make a fraudulent statement as erin burnett clearly has committed made a fraudulent statement so let's look at the real economy or we're talking all about

the bubble economy the fake commie the banking economy we know that's rigged we know that's a fake game we know it's not real now let's look at what they're in america trying to do to recover the economy florida lawmaker wants to repeal dorf tossing ban to create jobs bill workman a republican state legislator in florida said on a quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people all that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs that would be happy to get in this economy or any economy why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment. it's come to this but the way to stimulate the american economy is to legalize the war of speaking of door smacks let's move on to the next headline have geithner fly commercial to help cut the deficit so this is barney frank he's looking at ways to cut the deficit and one of the ways he's saying is prohibiting treasury officials from using military air transport a practice begun under former treasury secretary hank paulson and continued by

geithner it could contribute to reining in the deficit each flight of this kind cost at least one hundred fifty thousand dollars so you could apply this is like a shovel ready project max you take timothy geitner at the wharf and you throw him across the country for a flight saves money it employs a lot of people and this is i'm sure this is a thing this is like a combination of the. islamic practice where they have money going around the world so this is a combination of whole wall o. and tossing involving tim geithner so tim geithner wants to go from a state to new york to l.a. then he tossed person to person to person in a train york to l.a. or forgive all those. tim geithner would not be spending the taxpayer money. and ever works out we can toss them around the world. economy by advice we were. introduced your car. well stacy ever sent a letter as always thank you thank you max well i'll be back and lois i don't go

away. lose sleep.

i max kaiser welcome back to the kaiser report time now to go to one of my all time favorite cities beirut lebanon on the talk with dr. safety. visiting scholar at the center for capitalism and society at columbia university and a lecturer in economics at the lebanese american university safe walking back to the kaiser report thank you for having me max your latest piece is called barracks

odious debts what is the definition of an odious debt and how much did little barack leave behind the definition of odious that is debt that is incurred by a regime of the does not representative of the population it borrows on the whose behalf it borrows on so if a done if a dictator or for the authoritarian government borrows a lot of money in the name of its people and then uses the money to repress those people or turn itself under international law used to be that such debt would not be repaid by the success of governments. for some reason this is not a council that people talk about a lot anymore these days and when governments are replaced it's because the successor governments need to honor the obligations of their pre discussers and now is probably a good time to start bringing up the stop and making governments responsible themselves for the debts that they incur and not burden the populations with repaying the debt especially the debt was used to repress those populations rather

than to help them advance or to better their own economic situation right now during the revolution in cairo of course one of the major. talking points if you will was to not comply with any i.m.f. debt imposition now several months after the revolution and the i.m.f. and world bank loan packages are being rumored to being now accepted in egypt your thoughts there was a very positive sign after the revolution which is that the new government the interim. government particular the military rulers decided that they didn't want to take the i.m.f. and the world bank loans so it's a positive sign that the egyptian government turned down these loans it looks like however they're being moved to be returning to the i.m.f. and to the world bank asking for those loans nothing has been confirmed yet there's

been various sorts of reports about it in all sorts of different media outlets but it has not been confirmed yet but a lot of people are the thinking this could be a good thing to do right now because borrowing from the i.m.f. and world bank comes at a lower interest rate than borrowing from the domestic markets and considering that the budget of the egyptian government is being strained a lot by how much payments it has to make and by the crease in tax revenues this is beginning to look like more of a more of a of an attractive option for the people in charge of egypt today but you know it's still not clear what's going to happen because of all the political uncertainty and the economic uncertainty in the country it's not really clear what this will lead to well the initial interest rate from the i.m.f. of course is the teaser rate and once they've got their hooks in. then a lot of bad things tend to happen let's talk about the role of a corporatism and political and economic on rest whether in the arab world or in

the rest of the world for that matter so this the role of corporatism or a nail liberalism or the washington consensus do you see much of a future for that or is this global uprising going to reverse that trend you think well i mean if you if you will my opinion about the underlying economic causes of the revolution in egypt and in tunisia i would think it is the system of corporatism it's it's usually people usually talk about the you know the problem with egypt and tunisia was free market capitalism going rampant and going crazy the problem was that they introduced all those free market reforms with the world bank of the i.m.f. and that is what led to all these economic crisis i think that's a quite an accurate way of putting it. because what egypt and tunisia had. before the revolutions was by no means a free market system or capitalist system it was a actually a textbook case of corporate a system and by a corporate a system i mean the sort of classic example of that is into war italy italy under the selenium between the first and second world wars under that sort of economic

system you have a government that is very very very heavily involved in the workings of the private economy so it's not like socialism where the capital and the productive enterprises of society are owned by the government you do have private ownership however the government plays a very important role in directing production within that economy no wonder corporate the systems what ends up happening is that few powerful interests and the capturing the important positions in the big corporations and in the government and that was clearly the case in both egypt and tunisia leading up to the revolution the real problem with this is not just that they enrich themselves in office that that's bad enough that the people like mubarak and ben ali and associates became very rich the real problem from this sort of system is that it closes the opportunities in the face of all sorts of normal people in the country to be able to advance economically to be able to fulfill their potential to be able to have productive go to years and to have good jobs this is the real problem of

corporatism and i think the problem of egypt and tunisia was an economic system that was repressive of the needs of the people in the country it was an economic system that didn't allow people to reach the potential that they saw for themselves and i think that's why people revolted now the second part of your question about where this is going i think it's it's still really up in the air right now i'm not entirely sure how things are going to go but i think there's a positive sign which is that. the clout that the ruling regimes had over a canonic activity is being softened the they have less control over over a canonic activity than they did before those revolutions a lot of the most important figures in the corporate streams of tunis and egypt have fled the. untrue or they're in prison so a lot of the ways in which those regimes were able to suppress their people canonically are now breaking apart in one way or the other it's not completely over obviously the tunisian example is going to a bit better than the egyptian case but i'm slightly optimistic that they will

continue to improve and the south areas them will be weakened more and more in egypt say if you're headquartered in beirut you just finished up your ph d. at columbia university in new york so yeah have a good understanding of what's happening in new york i would imagine with the occupy wall street protests which have modeled them selves on occupy square the cairo uprising are these two similar were are they not some are and how would you compare and contrast these two protests there are some similarities but also some differences i think similarities what i was talking about in terms of the corporatism of the egyptian indonesian economists i think a very large extent applies to western economies as well if you look at the way they've done the states government has been acting over the last few years there's clear evidence that the dead are konami policies have been to the benefit of well connected firms and banks and to the detriment of the average american i think it's

also true in the case of the europe so in that sense you know it's good that you're witnessing that people are just not lying down and taking this other that they're standing up and they're rising but you know they're the are are many many differences and i think. there are some warning trends about the way that things are going on occupy wall street and in some of the other european countries where people you feel are missing the point sometimes when they talk about the importance of redistribution or they talk about raising taxes as the solution to this because if you think that you know everything is ok with the system but you know what needs to be done is just raising the tax rate on the rich people then i i think you have a very. big misunderstanding of what the problems really are it's the question is not about taxing the rich the question is about taking apart the system that makes some people the have the ability to become rich at the expense of others there's nothing wrong with being rich or something wrong with being rich. through illicit

means or through means where. where government support or government bailouts were involved in enriching. in reaching those people so. to focus on you know raising taxes on rich people i think is completely missing the point and the real worrying thing i think in occupy wall street what you've beginning to see of the last few days is that it is probably going to be co-opted by the mainstream political establishment so you've already seen people like nancy pelosi and block obama talk about how they are on the same side with the protesters and you know if they're right and you know if a lot of the protesters continue to be. sympathetic towards the sort of nancy pelosi and but obama take on things then you can see this degenerating into something like the tea party movement or something like the antiwar movement let's remember you know back in two thousand and two three and four there was a strong anti-war movement in the us believe it or not and that anti-war movement is what gave us barack obama he rode the crest of that antiwar movement but by the time he came into office he was indistinguishable from george bush when it came to

a wars similarly you know the tea party movement is now probably going to give us another presidential candidate who's very similar to obama and bush rick perry. so if you know if the occupy wall street movement ends up being co-opted by people like. obama or pelosi then obviously it's going to have been a big waste of time but you know hopefully hopefully something better will come out of it to summarize to keep points they are making hair you're making a distinction between corporatism and capitalism something that a lot of people wish folks like michael moore what i understand a little bit better in their critiques they're also saying that it's not a good idea to focus on the distribution or redistribution of wealth per se but to understand and to focus on the underlying systemic risk and the and the institutionalized. looting that's going on in the system now let me ask you one

last question safe. i wal street. what if you could go down there and write on all their placards just one phrase or one concept to unify them or if you had a chance to manage them down down there what would be your message. you know i know i think i'm not american myself so i wouldn't want to be presumptuous enough to put myself in a sort of position to be preaching to americans about how they need to be you know fixing their economy yeah what they have to say for me because i think they would say if they let me where be aware of being co-opted safe let me cut in here for a second because it's not just an american issue this is a global issue because the banks are operating in a globalized contacts and we've seen what happens in countries like tyro and egypt when they become a client state for american banks and now american banks have run out of poor

egyptians so they're attacking americans so it's a global problem so your suggestion is don't be co-opted that is that correct definitely the most important thing is not to be co-opted into part of the political system and to learn from the experience of the antiwar movement and one other thing i was a goal i think the best thing that could happen to egypt tunisia. europe and the u.s. at this point would be a complete separation of state and corporations the states should just completely stop dealing with the big corporations because it is under the pretext of regulating them and under the pretext of. ensuring the safety of their transactions with consumers the governments intervene on behalf of those companies on behalf of those big companies and then end up. using these interventions in a way in ways that are counterproductive and not helpful to the population so it's always it's always done under the pretext of you know looking out for the little guy but in reality it always. causing more problems than it solves and that's i

think that the problem of corporatism summarized ok so separation of corporation and state and i would imagine one of the first things to do along those lines would you take corporate money out of politics that's all the time we have thanks so much safer being on the kaiser report thanks for having us all right and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert and i thank my guests. if you want to send me an e-mail please do so and kaiser report it r t t v dot are you like scientists of my skies are saying.

broadcasting live direct from the heart of moscow this is r t i'm sean thomas and right now the sequel to top headlines in seattle police to strong arm tactics on peaceful demonstrators amid mounting criticism that the u.s. media isn't reporting what's motivating the wave of people to join the occupy wall street demonstrations the movement that started as a protest against america's financial center in new york a month ago has since spread across the whole world with protests in more than eight hundred cities. nato peacekeepers in northern kosovo extended the deadline for ethnic serbs to remove barricades near disputed checkpoints the months long standoff in the ethnically tents.